OK. We trust you. We’re lowering SCORM Cloud prices for big accounts.
Categories: SCORM Cloud
5 Mar 2010
SCORM Cloud is a relatively new product, and new products need prices and pricing schemes. So we picked one. We promised ourselves, though, that we would listen to our customers and prospective customers (the market) and that we would be willing to change that pricing structure if we needed to.
Well, I’m happy to announce today that we are raising prices across the board! You all seem to think the product is too cheap… wait, stop, hold on. I’m kidding. Nobody ever wants something to be more expensive.
Soooo, we’re lowering the price of every registration beyond the first 300 each month. Once you reach the “Big” plan ($300/month for up to 300 registration), there’s no bigger plan. We simply charge you $0.50 per registration for the next 700 registrations, and $0.25 per registration after that.
So, an example might help here. If your organization launched 1500 courses for the first time in March, you would be charged $300 (your basic fee) + $0.50 * 700 + $0.25 * 500 = $775 for the month.
Enjoy the reduced pricing. And if you have concerns or questions, or simply wish were doing something differently, tell us. We’re obviously open to your ideas.
Note: The new pricing scheme will be deployed next week sometime, and will affect your next bill, not this one.
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A teacher that hides the books really can’t expect the students to write well…
Categories: SCORM Cloud
4 Mar 2010
As we’ve mentioned several times, we want you all to be building applications against the SCORM Cloud. It is built explicitly with the purpose of being a piece of functionality in other applications.
As we first released the SCORM Cloud, we offered up the API, some client libraries, some documentation, and we even published a few sample applications, including several open source LMSs.
This was all fine and good, but we discovered something pretty quickly. Several of the people who were signing up to try the SCORM Cloud wanted something to do right away. They didn’t want to install a Moodle mod, or read through thrilling documentation. They wanted to import a course and see how it worked. So, we heard that message and decided to offer up that ability directly from the SCORM Cloud interface.
First, a word of welcome (for our new users)
Next, a place to import a piece of content
Now what?
The easiest way to send content is just to email it to someone…
And just like that, they can launch it…
So, students, we really want to see you out there experimenting with what’s possible via the SCORM Cloud. From the moment you create your account in SCORM Cloud, you’ll be able to import and deliver content. Let this spur your imagination.
As the next few months pass, we’ll start showing you some of the other things you can do via SCORM Cloud… But let this be a simple starting point for you.
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Well, put simply, we had a bad day on Wednesday. Frankly, I haven’t heard from anyone that they definitively noticed the downtime we had, but we’ve said all along that we would be direct and clear, and so we shall.
<AdmissionOfFailure>
On Wednesday, we were doing a bit of housekeeping. Frankly, Test Track users upload a lot of content. Periodically, we take the time via a manual process to seek out orphaned courses and those that haven’t been accessed in any way during the last 6 months. In doing this, we’re able to limit the vast quantities of SCORM content we have to keep up with.
Well, when we went to hit “delete” on the old, unaccessed courses, things went badly. We run multiple Amazon Webservice Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. First, the failure was noticed by a secondary instance which discovered it could no longer access content, and told us through an email. Second, the instances, in automated coordination, attempted to rectify the problem. Third, we discovered that this self-healing process failed, and that the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume which houses our content could not be remounted, due to an unexpected file system corruption.
An instance going down is no problem… we have more. In fact, this happens occasionally, and is handled without human intervention. The EBS volume going down and becoming unmountable… that’s a problem. Ultimately, this meant that people were unable to access any of the content hosted on SCORM Cloud, including all Test Track content, until we intervened and mounted an older volume… one that was known to function. This was done quickly. Old content and new uploads were available in less than 30 minutes. But here’s the kicker… content uploaded between December 10, 2009 and January 6, 2010 wasn’t available. This incident led us to discover a flaw in our backup scheme that meant recovering that content wasn’t a 10 minute job… In fact, it required recovering from a fatal flaw in the file system we use. The reconstruction/recovery process was kicked off right away, and all content was restored some 11 hours later. So, as of 2am CT on January 7, all content was restored, all users were made whole, and all was well, in a manner of speaking.
</AdmissionOfFailure>
<PostgameAnalysis>
Well, once we addressed the symptom and had everyone up and running again, we thought we should do a bit of analysis. We didn’t like how everything played out, we didn’t like that people were down for varying amounts of time, so we thought we’d go digging. It was time for a little game of 5 Whys.
To play 5 Whys, we started by asking, “What happened?”
We received notification from a secondary machine of an EC2 Failover Event on the primary (a.k.a. “The Sh*t Hit the Fan”)
WHY?
The primary couldn’t access the EBS volume (where the content is stored).
WHY?
Something caused the EBS volume’s XFS file system to crash/become corrupt.
WHY?
The EBS volume’s file system had an inconsistency (that we’ve since found dates back months) and series of aggressive deletes were called in succession from a secondary machine.
WHY?
This why results in many questions…
- Why was there a series of aggressive deletes? Did we need to be purging courses?
- Why was there an inconsistency in the file system dating back several months?
- Why does XFS have trouble freeing space in certain circumstances? Should we continue to use XFS?
Here, though, is a more interesting/actionable string of 5 Whys…
Content uploaded between Dec 10 and January 5 was unavailable for 11 hours.
WHY?
The EBS volume’s file system failed and our backup scheme didn’t allow for immediate or near immediate recovery of recently uploaded files.
WHY?
Our recovery scheme included reconstructing the drive, rather than simply using a more frequent/recent snapshot.
WHY?
Because we didn’t consider this eventuality sufficiently. We made a mistake.
HOW DO YOU REMEDY THAT MISTAKE?
We have already changed our scheme to persist remountable EBS content volumes hourly. This means that we can return to a snapshot that is no more than 1 hour old in a matter of minutes.
</PostgameAnalysis>
So, in total, we had ourselves a bad day on Wednesday. Did we recover completely? Yes. We’re pleased with that. Did we do so as quickly as we feel we should? We did not. Hopefully none of you were actually impacted. If you were, we’re sorry. If you weren’t, we hope we’ve taken the right steps to make you feel comfortable about our approach to mistakes.
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Lots and lots and lots of blog posts everywhere wrapping up 2009 and making predictions for 2010.
A key thing I see popping up frequently on lists from e-learning consultants is the idea of learning moving from the highly controlled environment of the LMS to the less controllable (and more mobile) web. Social/informal/self-directed/ubiquitous learning is about as buzzy as words get these days.
Which certainly leaves learning departments in a bit of a bind. They’re trying to show value for what they do and ensure certain specific things are being taught/learned/shared. There’s a push toward interoperability of systems within a company (where’s the LMS fit in?) and sensitivity to the high costs of pretty much everything. Many are attempting to embrace the new social movement, but scrambling to figure out how to show ROI.
As an avid life-long self-directed learner and strong believer in weak central control, I’m all for the less rigid future. It’s why the part of our SCORM Cloud product that gets me most excited is the learning anywhere aspect. And as a data geek, I love that SCORM lets you take learning where learners already are and still get the information you need to see what’s happening without an LMS.
So I’m interested to see if the e-learning oracles are right on this one for this year. And excited to see how people use SCORM Cloud to make the jump more comfortable.
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We are moving from [commercial hosted LMS] to [open source LMS] for now. But I really am looking at SCORM Cloud as a way to integrate the serving and tracking of training modules into our customer service portal, website and software. I dislike the concept of the standalone LMS.
–A prospect, via email, today
Let me say first, I totally understand the value of an LMS. To this point, we’ve built our entire business around LMSs and the content they deliver. I believe they still have a place, and they provide excellent value… for the right organization.
I also believe that there are companies, schools, and organizations that simply don’t have a need for a full fledged LMS. This is one great case for the SCORM Cloud… This prospect could easily embed the SCORM Cloud as a part of her HR system. In what system could you embed SCORM delivery?
(Now we wait and see if our prospect takes the bait!)
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